Colonial Rule: Missionaries and “Mercenaries” of Fortune and the Health of Africans

Abstract

Colonial authorities deliberately relied on the Church to make the imposed colonial system more acceptable to Africans by entrusting them with the educational system and the health care of the Africans through the introduction of biomedical practices as a hook to religious conversion, especially in the case of the Catholic missions in the Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian colonies, as well as the Anglican and the various other Christian denominations. France also used the Catholic institutions in this strategy but to a much lesser degree, along with the Alliance Francaise (Gifford and Weiskell 1971: 673–674), given the anti-clerical and anti-Catholic (and Protestant denomination sentiment), manifested against the Huguenot or Calvinist tradition in the country since the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, which clearly came to the fore during the French Revolution in 1789. However, the benefits of using the Church with caution, especially in the Muslim territories of the empire, in such territories as Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Algeria, all of North Africa, Senegal, Nigeria, Niger, Cote d’Ivoire, Djibouti, and Madagascar, were not entirely ignored or minimized in the realm of education and health. The following section briefly examines the role of the colonial Church, especially in health.